Hi there,

I've recently configured my Raspbian RPi to be a file server. I can achieve public access via SSH, local network file share via Samba and of course store a bunch of files via an E-HDD.

I want to know what the security implications are by opening up port 21 for FTP? The intentions of doing so is that so I can either "Map network drive" or "Add a network location" in my Dad's Windows laptop back home, and of course stream any media I have on there. GUI SSH is good and of course most ideal, but it doesn't provide me with streaming capabilities. So how much at risk am I from opening up port 21?

Note: I've recently installed and configured SSH Guard.

ftp is old, antiquated and insecure so use at your own risk. i would recommend sshfs (i use this to stream content to my xbmc machine from my fedora server) to mount remote server drives but i dont think it will work on windows so maybe your only option is ftp ?

1 members found this post helpful.

I found this and it works beautifully. However, I will run Wireshark upon connection to see if anything is transmitted in clear-text.

seems like a handy hack... but you are rite to be paranoid. like everything else on windows, downloading crap from random websites is probably the quickest way to install trojans.

Just in case you or anybody else comes across it, I found Dokan's Windows hack for SSHFS mounting is a little bit weak. Nice and simple, but isn't consistent. The below link (of WinSSHFS) is much better and reliable. However it doesn't accept URLs as hostname, just IP addresses.

https://code.google.com/p/win-sshfs/